process. The scribes—whether non-professional scribes in the early centuries or professional scribes of the Middle Ages—were intent on “conserving” the textual tradition they were passing on. Their ultimate concern was not to modify the tradition, but to preserve it for themselves and for those who would follow them. Most scribes, no doubt, tried to do a faithful job in making sure that the text they reproduced was the same text they inherited. Nonetheless, changes came to be made in the early Christian texts. Scribes would sometimes—lots of times—make accidental mistakes, by misspelling a word, leaving out a line, or simply bungling the sentences they were supposed to be copying; and on occasion they changed the text deliberately, making a “correction” to the text, which in fact turned out to be an alteration of what the text’s author had originally written. We examined in the preceding chapter one kind of intentional change—changes relating to some of the theological controversies raging in the second and third centuries, when most of the changes of our textual tradition were made.
